A general view of the Breonna Taylor Memorial at Jefferson Square Park during Day Three of BreonnaCon in Louisville, Kentucky after the death of Breonna Taylor.
Breonnacon Day 3, Simmons College, Louisville, Kentucky, USA – 24 Aug 2020
The Louisville Metro Police are pushing a deceptive narrative about the events leading up to 26-year-old Breonna Taylor’s killing, placing blame on her ex-boyfriend Jamarcus Glover. The police talking points are problematic enough on their own, framing Glover as the cause of Taylor’s killing because police were investigating his alleged involvement in drug trafficking.
According to the police, police obtained a warrant for Taylor’s home after Glover was seen allegedly picking up a package from there and taking it to a “known drug house.” Detective Joshua Jaynes said he verified with “a US Postal Inspector” whether Glover had received packages to Taylor’s apartment, but a Louisville postal inspector says that never happened, the Louisville Courier Journal reported.
Still, the police are relying on this narrative to place blame on Glover in Taylor’s killing. “The police are trying to make it out to be my fault and turning the whole community out here making it look like I brought this to Breonna’s door,” Glover told The Courier Journal in an interview. “There was nothing never there or anything ever there, and at the end of the day, they went about it the wrong way and lied on that search warrant and shot that girl out there.”
Some media reports propagated these police talking points by focusing their attention on Glover, while also framing him as Taylor’s “ex-boyfriend who was arrested on drug charges.” Meanwhile, Jonathan Mattingly, Brett Hankison, and Myles Cosgrove, the LMPD officers who shot and killed Taylor have yet to be arrested.
It’s a known fact that police lie. That was one reason departments across the country were pressured to use body cameras following the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014 — so that there could be no discrepancies between their record and the truth in cases of police violence. Still, they continue to push their false accounts. Police lied when they said George Floyd, who was killed by Minneapolis Police, “physically resisted officers.” They lied in Kenosha, Wisconsin, when they said Jacob Blake was resisting arrest when they shot him in the back seven times as Blake walked away from them to get in his car.
Despite the fact that police are not reliable sources, newsrooms continue to rely on police voices in their reports. In the process, these reports help to push a violent narrative that Black victims of police violence are responsible for their own brutalisation. The only people responsible for Breonna Taylor’s death are the officers that killed her, not her ex-boyfriend, and not her alleged proximity to a narcotics investigation that also relied on some pretty iffy police accounts.
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